The Halifax Connection (4 page)

Hope the poor bugger doesn’t die
, Hillier thought, and sank back into his bed.

The carriage pulled away at a steady, dignified pace. Erryn Shaw lay limp across the seat, his long arms and legs splayed out in all directions. Once the carriage had gone a few hundred yards, he opened his eyelids just enough to see through the lashes, to note who was in the carriage with him and whether the curtains were well and properly closed. Then he sat up with a groan of relief, wiping his face and hair with a linen handkerchief. Hawkins, sitting opposite, watched impassively. He was considerably shorter than Erryn, but built like a standing stone; his thinning grey hair was the only hint of his sixty-odd years.

“Good evening, colonel.”

“Mr. Shaw. I trust you’re all right?”

“Oh, quite, thank you. Did Matt get anything?”

“Get anything?”

“On the cargo, sir.”

It was difficult for Erryn to keep impatience from his voice. He’d had far too much time to worry, lying limp in the dirt, wondering what might be hidden in the
Dover
, wondering also if they would have to discover it at the cost of his life. He had been able, just barely, to see Matt hunched over the prisoner, systematically going through his clothing. It seemed to take forever, and the longer it took, the more he grew afraid. What if there was nothing to find? They could not let the vessel sail. They would have to impound it, search it from stem to stern, looking for something whose very existence should be unknown to them. Only a handful of men in
Canada had known of the
Dover’s
secret cargo, quite possibly as few as three: Janes himself, Alexander MacNab, and Erryn Shaw. To the Confederates, MacNab was above suspicion. That left Erryn.

My brother had you figured from the start, Shaw. Said you was too perfect by half, and yet you was always around when things went to pieces. Just like now …

It was always with him, that voice like Arctic ice, and the words colder still, always sitting in some dark, quiet place in the back of his mind, waiting to come at him like a ghost. The man was dead now, but the threat would stay with him forever. He might die at this. After twenty years of choices leading him farther and farther away from his glittering genealogy of knights and captains-general and admirals of the fleet, he might nonetheless die in some damned foreign war.

“For Christ’s sake, sir, did Matt learn anything about the cargo?”

Hawkins pulled an envelope from an inside pocket and withdrew a narrow piece of printed paper, like a page from a book torn in half down the middle. “He had this.”

“What is it?”

“Dickens.
Great Ex
something or other.”

“Great Expectations
, no doubt. How fitting.”

Hawkins unfolded a letter. “He also had this. Quite harmless if a chap didn’t know what to make of it, just family news and such. Except for a bit. ‘Your trunks will arrive Dover early July. You will need this.’” Hawkins waggled the torn book page. “‘This,’ I expect, is
this.
And the captain of the
Dover
likely has the other half, and will only surrender the cargo to the man who has its mate.” He paused and added wryly, “Or, of course, to an officer of the port authority with a lawful warrant.”

It was not much, Erryn thought, but perhaps it was enough.

“Thank God for lawful warrants, eh, colonel?”

“Do I detect a small note of cynicism?”

“Cynicism? From me? Never in a thousand years.” Carefully Erryn shook out the handkerchief he had used to wipe his head.
Bits of sand and other rubbish, best not examined, scattered onto the floor. The cloth itself was sticky and red.

“What the devil is that, anyway?” Hawkins asked.

“Theatre blood. You don’t want to know how we make it.” He glanced down at himself, brushing briefly and uselessly at his fouled vest and sleeves. He had looked altogether elegant when he left his room. “I fear the governor shall have to pay handsomely to have me scrubbed and mended.”

“Knowing you, I’m sure the governor will.”

“Cynicism would appear to be contagious.”

Hawkins merely smiled. Erryn had never asked him, but he often wondered if the colonel had a history in this sort of work; if somewhere, in one of the empire’s innumerable conflicts—or perhaps in many—he had done it all before.

“I wonder what we’re going to find,” the colonel murmured after a bit. “In the
Dover.
How did Janes put it to you, back in Montreal? He’d have the whole Red Sea coming down on Pharaoh’s army? Something like that, wasn’t it? Do you suppose the man is sane?”

“Yes, actually. And all the more dangerous for it.”

“Aye.” Hawkins edged his curtain back just a whisper. “We’re almost there.”

“I don’t suppose an empty shed in Her Majesty’s Ordnance Yard would contain anything so civilized as a bed, would it?”

“A bed?”

“Whatever Janes has in that ship, you’re not likely to get it over here before lunch. And my head’s smashed in, remember? A bed would be bloody nice.”

Hawkins considered him for a small time, the way men considered strangers in a tavern or the morning sky at sea. “You’re all right, Shaw,” he said.

“Why, thank you, sir.”

“I wondered about you, you know,” the colonel continued. “When Calverley took you on. I knew you had the skills, of course.
But I wondered how you’d wear.” A ghost of a pause. “I mean no offence.”

“None taken, sir. If I’d had any sense back then, I would have wondered too.”

If I’d had any sense back then, I wouldn’t have signed on at all.

But no, that was quite untrue. He had done some good work, and he could never wish it undone. Still less could he wish that he had never gone to Montreal in the fall, or walked by the Irish Stone, or met a woman there, a woman with midnight hair and heartbreaking, melancholy eyes …

But this much was true: when Matt Calverley took him on, he had not wondered in the least how he would wear. He had been … well, he thought, the kindest word would be “innocent.” He had looked upon it all as a passing adventure. He would be generously paid; he would be of service to his country in a time of crisis; he would not be bored. All of these things proved true. The trouble was, two and a half years ago he had little notion of what else might be riding on the same train.

Two and a half years ago. February of ’62 it had been, winter as only the North Atlantic knew it. The whole of Halifax was gone grey as a stone, and the life he had fashioned there seemed over.

T
HE WILD, PROUD MUSIC
of pipes and drums soared out from the Grand Parade, echoing against the ironstone warehouses and wooden sheds of the waterfront, sweeping up through narrow streets to the stone casements of the Citadel and beyond. Four blocks away, amid the ruins of the Grafton Street Theatre, Erryn Shaw raised his head a little at the sound, but made no move to get up. Instead, he let his eyes travel one more time across the burnt-out lot; every detail of it tore at his heart. A gaunt stray cat sat shivering in the broken chimney. Indifferent citizens had dumped off piles of trash that tumbled about now in the bitter February wind. There was no snow. The ground was blackened and horrid, the charred beams lying strewn across each other like battlefield dead. Everything felt unbearably empty and abandoned; everything stank of old, wet ashes and decay.

Seven weeks ago he had sailed for Bermuda, hoping to escape his sadness for a time, imagining that when he returned the rubble would be cleared away, and plans for rebuilding would be in the air. Instead, he found the owner had no money to rebuild; he had sold the land to a soap maker. As for those in the city with plenty of money, a theatre was not considered a good investment. It was unlikely to earn impressive profits, and it was, in any case, a thing of dubious respectability, the best of a long line of tainted livings, running down through the music hall, the tavern, the Barrack Street dive, and finally the whorehouse.

Or so it seemed to Erryn Shaw, sitting on a few broken bricks in the rubble, wondering why his life kept going up in smoke. For eight and a half years the Grafton Street Theatre had been his work and his joy, his hope of mattering a little in the world. Now it was gone, and he had no idea how he might replace it. He felt devalued and defeated, and everywhere he looked he saw grey skies, grey water, and grey mud.

It did not help that the entire Halifax garrison was on parade just a few blocks away, the drum rolls soaring to make a young man’s blood race, and the bagpipes keening to bring tears to his eyes—all of it so bright and glorious, the men proud as peacocks in their fine red coats and their furry black hats, with the whole city waving and cheering them on.

Maybe I should have joined the bloody army after all, back in England, before any of this happened …

Then he laughed, bitterly, shoved his hair out of his eyes, and got slowly to his feet. When he started thinking in those terms, even in self-mockery, it was time to go. The military life, God almighty, how he had dreamt of it when he was a boy. He knew every English warrior hero back to Boudicca; he had paintings of Nelson and Wellington hanging on his bedroom walls; and the fact that he loved books and plays and poetry just as much, and learned to play the flute before he was ten—none of this ever made any difference. He saw no contradiction in his dreams,
though he was smart enough to wonder, even as a boy, how he would manage to have it all, the pipes and the drums and the waving banners, and the quiet charm of a study, and the glittering magic of a lighted stage, all of it in one lifetime, in one body. But he believed it was possible. When you were twelve and clever and the son of an earl, anything was possible. When you were past thirty and no longer the son of an earl, except by the irrevocable fact of blood, it was all very different.

Erryn tucked his hands into the warmth of his pockets and started walking. He knew exactly where he would have found himself if he had joined the army with his peers—in the bloody Crimea, and more than likely dead, along with twenty-one thousand others, one out of every five who marched for queen and country, their young lives flung away in a war so bungled its stupidity was already legendary, so pointless it was rare to find an ordinary Englishman who understood what it was about, except that it had something to do with stopping the Russians.

Now the drums were beating again. Now the same damn fools were screaming about stopping the Americans.